Monthly Archives: June 2009

As awkward as it may be we’ve decided to put on our self-promotion hats this week. SoundCloud has been nominated for three categories in the Techcrunch Europas Awards that recognise and celebrate this past year’s most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations. You don’t need to register or fill out any silly forms (as is quite often the case with these things!). So if you have a few spare seconds then show us some click-love and vote via the links below

Fellow Berliner Richie Hawtin has always kept himself at the forefront of music technology ever since his rise to the top of the electronic music scene in the 90’s. He’s well known for his early use of laptops and digital mixing equipment, from the development of Midi enabled DJ mixers such as Allen & Heath’s Xone92 & 3D mixers, to Final Scratch DJ technology. More recently he helped launch a Twitter app for Traktor that tweets the details of tracks as he plays them in his live sets.

So it’s a sign of the times that he’s now using the SoundCloud DropBox to receive DJ promos for himself and artist demos for his label Minus.

Thanks to some changes to the way existing users can drop tracks to each other it’s now simpler than ever to do. There’s no need to upload again to someone’s DropBox, the sender can simply select one of their existing tracks.

So, if you’re a DJ, label or journalist, make things easy for yourself and the people sending you tracks… start using your DropBox today.

We’re all going crazy today at the SoundCloud office clicking around our new release–it’s mad slick! So slick in fact that we decided to name it Kim after Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, who by the way used SoundCloud heavily for the release of their new album… There are a few major upgrades in this release that we’d love to tell you about.

Where’s my DropBox?

There has been some confusion previously on what the difference was between dropping a track in someone’s “DropBox” and sharing the track to someone privately. So you’ll be pleased to know that we’ve simplified this by effectively making “dropping” and “sharing” the same thing. Using the DropBox to “drop” a track to somebody will now simply share it to that person.

This change has also allowed us to simplify the way you receive tracks too. The most radical difference is that there is actually no DropBox tab anymore. But don’t worry, it’s better now because you’ll get everything in your dashboard instead. Plus you’ll also get two clean lists of incoming tracks: one from people you are following, and one from others (people you are not following). This makes it easier to stay up to date with what tracks have been shared to you-regardless of whether they came through your DropBox or not!

Smarter DropBox

We’ve added one of our most requested features: you can now drop already uploaded tracks into anybody’s DropBox. And you can even drop public tracks. Dropping a public track will notify the recipient in their dashboard and over email just like for private sharing (naturally these notifications can be turned off as well).

Better navigation

We’ve redesigned the site header with smart dropdown menus that make it easy to find all key areas of the site in one click.

Groups

Groups are an entirely new feature on SoundCloud. They can be started by anybody and are a great way to bring people together around a specific theme or project. Want to start a remix contest? Make a group for it and let people send their remixes to that group. You’ll get a DropBox badge for the group that you can put on any page. And you’ll get a great player widget that will show all tracks that have been posted to the group. Groups can also be moderated to give you full control over its contents if required. More info and ideas on groups will follow soon in a blog post dedicated to this great new feature.

So that’s it for perhaps the biggest upgrade ever since the birth of the Cloud. Now go play!